Wonderful World of Wisdom - For the Love of Fools

Preached on Sunday, August 19, 19-2018

  

Scripture Readings: Romans 1:8-17; Proverbs 26:1-12; Matthew 5:21-22, 43-48

Back in the seventeen-hundreds, John Wesley was a reformer in the Church of England, trying to get people to grow in their faith by training themselves in using disciplines of the heart, instead of just using the discipline of their brain and ideas. Wesley saw the Good News as a matter of the heart as well as the mind and, strangely, this made many enemies.

Walking Downtown, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

Wesley went traveling around the country, teaching and preaching from place to place. On his way to his next appointment, he had to cross a stream that had only a narrow foot bridge to get him over. It was a one-way, one-at-a-time bridge, and one of those enemies stood on the other side, wanting to cross.

The enemy was another priest in the same church as Wesley and they both recognized each other at once. The enemy was a big, burly guy and he was going to give Wesley a bad time. He picked up his walking stick and held it cross-wise, like a gate held tight to shut Wesley off from his mission; or maybe like a stave for a fight. And he was claiming that Wesley was a fool.

They lived in the age of honor and the enemy served Wesley up with an insult.

He glared and growled at Wesley, “I never suffer a fool to pass!” He wasn’t going to let John through.

Only, he didn’t count on Wesley’s great sense of humor, or the fact that Wesley didn’t give his own honor a hoot. “You never suffer a fool to pass? Well, I always do!” And he stepped aside from the bridge and bowed for the big guy to cross and pass. Who was the fool now?

That is a picture of one of our proverbs today. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” (26:4)

On one hand, the solution was really simply. The enemy barred the way and the reformer got out of the way. Not answering the fool according to his folly meant not stooping to be like him. It wasn’t simply wise. It was smart.

They lived in the age of honor. It was the age of dueling. The church condemned dueling and the culture of honor as immoral and godless and foolish. The enemy was tapping into the age of honor, challenging Wesley to a duel of battle staffs in the form of their walking sticks. Again, Wesley didn’t answer the fool according to his folly.

But Wesley told the enemy (or else did he show the enemy?) that he was a fool. In Proverbs you find that the fool builds a trap to take someone else, but (in the end) they get caught in their own trap. So, Wesley used the second proverb of the pair. “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”

Wesley copied his enemy by putting on his own witty production on the footbridge and foiled the enemy’s threat. John’s clever doge made it impossible for the enemy to be wise in his own eyes. The big guy got caught in his own trap.

The pair of proverbs in chapter twenty-six, verses four and five, literally contradict each other. The whole Book of Proverbs almost didn’t get into the Jewish Scriptures simply on the fact that it contained this one, clear contradiction.

There was a rabbi’s council that met toward the end of the first century AD to standardize the Jewish faith. It was an emergency council, because the Romans had destroyed their country and scattered their people. The Romans had destroyed the official copies of the scriptures in the Temple that were used to standardize new copies.

The rabbis were afraid to include the book that had this pair of contradictions in plain sight. So, they claimed that the two proverbs had to be about two different kinds of fools, one kind that you could talk to and the other kind that you couldn’t talk to, but the proof wasn’t there, and no one was ever really fooled.

I would propose a lesson in the perfect and compete inspiration of the Scripture that we can learn from this pair of contradictory proverbs. I would say that the Scriptures are so inspired by the power of God that even when they contradict each other, they still work. They still teach the truth. They still give us the full wisdom, and counsel, and guidance of God.

This level of inspiration is where we have to start if we want to hear God speak to us through these two contradicting proverbs. The conflict doesn’t prove that the scriptures are merely human, and not divine. It teaches us to see that the human words and the divine words are part of one unified project that God has designed for our salvation.

The word that is both human and divine contains, at its core, the plan for God to give us the bridge from earth to heaven, and from mortal life to the born-again life in this world. God became Jesus, who is completely and perfectly both human and divine. The plan of God is to provide himself with a whole universe of sons and daughters, who will include us.

This plan is that we will be taken up into the presence, and the healing, and the joy, and the glory of God. There, in the sight of God, we will truly and perfectly be both human sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and we will be the genuine and spiritual sons and daughters of God.

When Jesus grabs us and makes us his own, we move from seeing a contradictory, unexplainable hodgepodge that has no rhyme or reason…we go from seeing the mysterious mess, to seeing the one great mystery revealed in Jesus Christ whose perfect and complete nature as God and human bridges the gap between God and us created by sins. God and human, together in Jesus, defeated sin and death on the cross, and in the empty tomb.

Seeing Christ opens the Bible to us. It opens the secret and the nature of life, in this world, to us. Seeing and knowing Christ in his apparent contradictions opens prayer to us. It opens the puzzle of our free will, and of God’s sovereign will, just a crack. It opens the future to us.

I am very intensely interested in having reliable information on what the will of God is for me and for you. Do you understand me? You may want the exact same thing as I do. I want a direct line to the will and the mind of God.

God’s contradictory pair of proverbs teaches me about this line to the will of God. It tells me that I should never be surprised to find that God has more than one way for me to choose and do something. You can decide that what I’m saying has nothing to do with Biblical teaching and truth, but here it is. When I was in college I always had summer jobs. I also had some jobs during the school year, usually work-study jobs: but I had this pair of jobs open to me one summer and I didn’t know which one to choose. I won’t tell you what they were.

You’d figure it out right away, but I was twenty-one years old and not that bright. I wanted to do both but I could only choose one. There were good reasons for both, but I could only choose one. I prayed, read the Bible, asked for good advice.

Nothing helped. Then, during a time of prayer, I felt God say something like this, “Choose whichever job you want. I’ll bless you either way.” God had organized his own world to give me any number of choices, and I’m sure that he knew which choice I would make, but it had to be a choice generated within myself.

God had also provided me with at least two ways to make the choice that pleased him. That gift was the choice of using my chooser (otherwise known as my heart) or the choice of using my head, which had a brain hidden inside it.

Sometimes we have more than one God-blessed choice to choose from. God will bless us, whatever choice we make, but each blessing will be different, and we will never know the possible consequences of the choice not taken.

The real contradiction of our pair of proverbs has another, completely different message for us. The very contradictions almost form the message for us.

In the larger picture, we see that fools are a danger, not only to themselves, but to others as well. Their lives are about themselves. They are the people who say “Me, me, me,” all the time.

All fools are, first of all, me-me-me fools. Because of this, fools are fools because they don’t understand anything. They don’t understand the importance of God and the importance of others as being a required foundation for the importance of you. You can’t separate your love and care for yourself from your love and care for God, for others, and for the creation.

In this lack of understanding (because they won’t listen to God because they don’t trust him to let them go on straying “me-me-me” forever, and so they will not let God be God) fools stand in the way of God’s desires for others, they harm those others, they harm the creation, and they harm themselves.

Remembering this foundation, our pair of contradictions teach us that wise people can turn into fools, and that fools can lose their foolishness and begin to be wise. Foolishness never ends well unless you end your foolishness first.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” If you really are as wise as you think you are, then you may be too wise for your own good. That kind of wisdom isn’t wisdom at all. Then you are actually only wise in your own eyes. Then dealing with the foolishness of a fool can make you turn you into a fool.

“Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” The finest and most fatal form of foolishness consists of being wise in your own eyes. And we have that proverb at the end of our reading that says. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”

Being wise in your own eyes is the beginning and the end of foolishness. It’s the foundation and the roof of foolishness. Then you are finished and there’s more hope for a fool than for you.

This pair of contradictions contradicts all of our fondest wishes: that we can depend on being what we want to be to the end.

This is wrong for many reasons. Most of all, God has based his creation on a pattern of contradictions. Some things never change. The amount of energy in the universe is unchanging, never added to and never lost. This essence of the creation never, never, changes.

And yet change is happening all the time in things as they are or seem to be. Everything seems to always be changing. You can find that you are not what you thought you are, and what you are can change.

So, we come to another seeming contradiction. The condition of a fool seems to be hopeless and unchanging, except for the fact that it isn’t.

Looking at history and foolishly wondering how it might have been, I could say that Hitler turned out to be a fool but, if we had judged him to be a fool from the start and fought him as if he were a fool, then he would have destroyed us. Never give yourself the pleasure of judging anyone and calling them a fool. It might destroy you.

And your fool might become wise and your wisdom might look pretty foolish. If you hate the fools you may be hating yourself. If you judge them you might be judged. That sounds like something Jesus said. The wise show us the face of God by showing us the face of Jesus. Don’t hate someone because you don’t see the face of Jesus. See the face of Jesus that might become their face. Don’t be angry, and don’t call anyone a fool. You might be the fool yourself. See everyone, as well as yourself, living in the environment of the love and grace of the Father.

Paul shows this as he opens his self-referral letter to the church in Rome. Paul wrote, “I am obligated both to Greeks and to non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.” (Romans 1:14-15) I think the readers of this letter would wonder whether Paul was saying that the Greeks were the wise and the non-Greeks were the foolish or the other way around. And, if it was important to Paul so that he felt he owed you a debt of duty to bring you the gospel, would it be because he thought you were a fool, or because he thought you were wise.

Do you want to be loved because you are wise? Or, do you want to be loved because you are a fool?

With Paul, it could be either way. But how would that make you feel? You must know that Paul tried to think in conformity to the mind of God, the mind of Christ. We tend to think that the Bible shows God hating fools when it only says that he hates what fools make happen.

Have you ever loved someone and found that they had made their lives horrifying and disgusting? That is a hatred that comes from love. The eternal thing, there, is the love, and love will pray for mercy.

God loves the wise and the foolish, even when he finds us horrifying and disgusting. Would you want it any other way?

God’s mission in Jesus was a mission of love to the wise and the foolish, and it appears that the people with a well-earned reputation for wisdom didn’t recognize God and God’s message when it came in Jesus. The Lord was recognized by the babies of the world, which means not just the youngest and the smallest physically, but some of the Hebrew words for foolish refer to people who have not developed into maturity.

As we can see, although fools are unredeemable, fools may not end up as fools. Fools may become the wise ones. And it’s the babies, the unfinished and the immature who may suddenly become wise in the presence of a God who made himself profoundly small and human for them.

This is the chasm which is only bridged by the Lord who has made a foolish looking sacrifice for those who least deserve it. Paul didn’t care who you thought you were. He would always think better of you than that.

Whether you were wise or foolish, Paul would see you as something so much more. Paul would see you as someone he was obligated to. He would see himself as indebted to you because of God in Christ who bridged the distance between God and humans, glory and a mud-ball, glory and a painful death. That is the wisdom of God. That guarantees that we should not be wise in our own eyes.

We have to live by a different wisdom than our own. So, we must die to ourselves and rise with the wisdom of God crucified for us in Jesus. We must make God’s mission our own.

We own everyone around us, and everyone in this world a God sized debt, a debt that looks like Jesus, a debt that insists on making us into Jesus for the sake of others. Only then can we be wise in his eyes. Only in the sacrificial love of Jesus for those who crucified him can we know what our life is for, and how to live it out, and thrive for others, and thrive for ourselves.